Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Thomas Merton: The Only Known Photograph of God

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

A Dance to the Secrets of Time and Motion: The Pendulum Wave

Notice that at first the swinging balls form a line, then fall out of sync, forming snakes, squiggles and spirals. Our brains are wired to predict everyday behavior. We need math to understand this. Yet the world blunders on, trusting what is comfortably predictable.

Bats & Echolocation: Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. . .
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

8/19/14

William James Sidis: The Smartest Person Ever?

The following essay is about William James Sidis, whom Robert Persig (Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) discusses in his novel, Lila. Sidis's one great passion in life was collecting street car transfers.

The account comes from a web page I saved to my hard drive. Before uploading it, I checked it and found it dead, but still want to give credit, so here is the obsolete URL--http://members.aol.com/popvoid/TOC.html. Jim Morton, the essayist, uses Peridromophilia as a term for Sidis's love of street car transfers.

Peridromophilia Unbound:William James Sidis
By Jim Morton

The great geniuses of mankind are often said to be "born ahead of their time." William James Sidis, on the other hand, seems to have been born out of his time completely; on the wrong world, in the wrong dimension. Perhaps someday the world will understand "Willie" Sidis's strange genius, but that day is far off indeed.

Sidis was born in 1898. His father, Boris Sidis, taught psychology at Harvard and was considered one of the foremost psychologists of his day. The boy was named after William James, a leading psychologist and brother to author Henry James. Boris argued that traditional approaches to child-rearing obstructed the learning process. The elder Sidis was determined not to make the same mistake with his son.

He started by stringing words together with alphabet blocks above the child's crib. He eschewed the usual "googley-goo" baby-talk that adults lapse into around infants, speaking instead to the child in the same way he would speak to an adult. If the boy showed any interest in a subject, Boris encouraged his curiosity and study.

The effect of all this on the boy Sidis was astounding. By the time he was two, Willie was reading literature meant for adults; by age four he was typing letters in French and English; at age five he wrote a treatise on anatomy and dazzled everyone with a mathematical expertise few adults could match.

William Sidis graduated from Brookline High School when he was eight years old. When he applied at Harvard, the entrance board suggested he take a few off to let his personality catch up with his intellect. Willie spent the time between high school and college reading books in French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish and Armenian.

The boy entered Harvard at age eleven, becoming the youngest student ever to attend the school. Later that year he gave a speech in front of the Harvard Mathematical Society 0n the subject of "Four-Dimensional Bodies." After the speech, Professor Daniel Comstock of MIT told reporters that the boy would someday be the greatest mathematician of the century. From that moment on, William Sidis's world was never the same. Reporters followed his every move. He was a celebrity. His classmates treated him indifferently. The boy kept to himself, walking to his classes alone.

Suddenly Sidis realized his intellect was not admired; it was stared at. He wasn't merely intelligent; he was a freak. Within a year, the boy suffered a nervous breakdown. The boy was taken to his father's Psychotherapeutic Institute and treated. A few months later, Willie was back at Harvard, studying as diligently as ever.

He graduated cum laude at the age of sixteen. In 1918, he began teaching mathematics at Rice University in Texas. The annoyance of constant media attention finally took its toll. Quitting his teaching post, the young man moved back to Boston and, after a notorious arrest at a socialist march, disappeared from sight.

In 1924, a reporter found him in New York City, working in a Wall Street office for menial pay. Sidis told the reporter that he was not the boy-wonder he once was. He wanted anonymity and a menial job that made no demands on him. Soon afterwards, he dropped out of sight again.

As an adult, Sidis had one great passion. A passion that has intrigued psychologists and writers for years. Sidis spent hours every day in search of street car transfers. He would chase them through windy lots, chisel them from icy sidewalks and rescue them from rainy gutters. During his lifetime, he collected over two thousand of them, all different.

In 1926, he published a book on the subject of his hobby. The book, Notes on the Collection of Transfers, is, to say the least, esoteric. Sidis filled it with page after page of detailed information on how the transfers are interpreted, how to use them to their best advantage and the techniques used by the devoted "peridromophile" (his term for a someone who collects street car transfers) to find abandoned transfers. For those with merely a passing interest in the subject, he provided a chapter of bad street car jokes. Sidis used the pseudonym, "Frank Folupa" to throw the press off the track, but it did not work. The book was quickly ascribed to him and once again, Sidis had to flee from the curious eyes of the press. Losing himself in the crowded streets of New York City.

Sidis managed to stay out of view for many years after that. Until 1937, when a writer working for New Yorker magazine found him in a run down rooming house in South Boston. Sidis told the reporter that he was no longer the mathematical genius he once was. "The very sight of a mathematical formula," he claimed, "makes me physically ill." When the New Yorker article appeared, Sidis sued for invasion of privacy. Acting as his own attorney, Sidis offered to take an I.Q. test to prove just how normal he was. The suit was thrown out of court.

Again the world forgot about him, until 1944, when, at the age of 46, William James Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Several articles and a book have been written about Sidis. All of them point to Boris Sidis as the misguided mastermind behind Willie's fall. Boris Sidis, the writers argue, by depriving the boy of a "normal" childhood, turned him into a freak, incapable of ever fitting comfortably into society.

It's a neat argument. It follows the accepted pattern of parental folklore. It sounds logical, but it's all wrong. In the first place, contrary to popular belief, Boris Sidis was not a slave driver coaxing his son to "learn, learn learn!" Rather, he used positive reinforcement to encourage his son's exploration of subjects that interested him. The knowledge the boy gained was based not on his father's iron will, but on the boy's own curiosity. Boris Sidis was one of the leading psychologists of his day, he knew the dangers of indoctrination and parental aggression.

In the second place, Sidis had little difficulty fitting into society. He found jobs easily and always worked hard. If he moved from one job to another, it was because of the press; or because someone at this job recognized him. Whenever he was recognized, his employers quickly sought to take advantage of mathematician in their midst, but Sidis no longer wanted to be that mathematician. If he used his talent at math, he wanted no strings attached. At one establishment, his knowledge of mathematics led him to completely rework their statistical tables. The bosses were impressed and tried to get him to use his talent for their advantage. Sidis soon quit.

"All I want to do is run an adding machine, but they won't leave me alone."

Sidis was only a failure in terms of goals assigned to him by others. If he did not become "the greatest mathematician of the century," as Professor Comstock predicted, the failure lies in Comstock's skill as a prognosticator, not in Sidis's refusal to live up to the prediction. One thing is certain: Sidis's knowledge of street car transfers is unexcelled. He was, and is, the greatest peridromophile in history. For this, we salute him.

spiritrambler(at)gmail.com

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
On John Van Druten's gravestone

Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
"These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat. . . .They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat."
"So . . .what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal. Are you getting the picture?"
(From "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson. Of such a contention, Colin McGinn says we are not equipped to explain the experience of consciousness.)

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

God and the Devil are talking, looking down at the desert where one of God's chosen is having a sacred vision. "You see," says God.” Now you will be out of business because my child has realized the Truth."Not at all," says the Devil. "I will help him organize it."

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest HemingwayI can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John